FTL-28… Faster Than Life.

*Before…

It’s a flagship too like The Apollo but it really isn’t.

Long but with top and bottom sleek beveled armor and it looks sleek and then there’s the grand tower of the bridge and then there’s these huge arms/bridging sections that come off of it and extend out to these pods and each of these pods is like casing and FTL protections for smaller combat warships that it’s carrying.

Like sixteen of them in the two kilometer length ready to detach and disengage at will and that’s not even coming close to the hundred plus meter middle strip of the ship between the plate that is literally turrets and weapons and landing and fighter bays.

You know you’re really becoming part of the military culture when you see something like that and you smile.

I smiled because we were so close we could amplify to visual and see it in detail.

Heck I didn’t know what I was seeing with everything until I heard the watch commander talking about it with definite reverence.

The sound of someone who served on something like that.

I want to serve maybe on something like that.

*And Now…

I’m watching it go and so are others and I look over and Corporal Stillwater is there and she’s drinking a tall soy-caf that smells like it’s very strong so like double or triple brewed and she looks over the screens and she’s definitely checking out The Ranger as it passes through.

She looks at me and she has another drink. “You had a question, you link posted a query.”

I actually had I’ve still been listed as brevet ensign for a while now even during my downtime.

I wasn’t expecting Stillwater to show up just for this though.

“Yes Corporal I was wondering why my Brevet status was still ongoing?”

“Your brevet’s still standing Stone until this fracas is over but we’re cleared for regular duties so you can go about your works as per usual or put in for shore leave.”

I look at her and blink. “I didn’t get the message on my rank status Corporal.”

“I know but it’s in the reg-manuals which you should be more familiar with.”

“Yes Corporal can I ask why Corporal?”

“Because you’re placed over just a cadet, which means you’re until you’re returned to status functionally ship staff and when things come down to you doing something and you having to lead some other cadets then you’ll actually have a clue on how to do that in the right way.”

“Oh…”

She looks at me and she smiles around her soy-caf. “That’s alright Stone you’re still as green as grass yet. I’m just giving you a heads up so you don’t end up doing something that lands you in the soup.”

I breathe a little easier. “Thanks Corporal.”

She nods. “It’s just a little hand from a more experienced soldier.”

I nod and I kind of appreciate it. It might not sound like too much but all these little things get looked at all the time by the people in fleet that together the assessments and then pass that sort of stuff to the commanders.

I want to actually do well in this, in my new life here. “Thanks I’ll scan through all of the required reads when I’m off duty.”

She nods. “Can’t wait to try some of the things you have planned for that dinner thing.”

I nod. “Me too actually, ship food and a few things from my times on shore leave is as exotic as I’ve ever eaten really.”

“Synth food kid?”

I nod. “Mostly yeah it lasts long and it was pretty much the evolved standards for anyone in the middle class since actual food prep wasn’t a thing that people really did. It was considered lower class and gauche.”

She looks at me and she nods. “Dennan-7 was like that too.”

I tilt my head. “Is that where you’re from?”

She nods taking a drink of her soy-caf again.

“Just about everything was bot run, we’re a mining planet and there’s these huge deposits of stone that people actually find decorative and the most work that most folks do there from day to day as labor was running remote mining bots and the running fine work bots and things. My dad was the breadwinner and considered a low class menial type being a bot mechanic. I had the whole option of doing that for a living since I was spiked or getting out.”

“What’s spiked?”

“It’s when people go back in your data files when they’re looking to hire you or to let you into a school and the like and then they see you’re from a family that does manual labor and they get all uppity and they tag your file into the network with an item of interest tag. It’s illegal as hell but they still do it since it’s hard to prove. We call it spiking since it’s like someone drugged your life.”

“I hit a wall, I wasn’t me and it was never getting better and it was come here and do something and get my life fixed or have my head fixed and pretty much get erased.”

She finishes her coffee which is pretty much chugging the last third of it and I don’t think that I could learn that as a skill anytime soon and she tosses the cup in the bin.

“Yeah there’s a lot of that especially with Faithful colonies and the like. I’d say between gender and sexuality issues and that rewriting bullshit we get a few dozen every recruiting like you.”

I frown. “So much for humanity becoming more and more enlightened with the age of space and FTL travel.”

“Humans are assholes where and whenever we’re at Stone. And sometimes we’re even monsters or turn into it.”

I take a breath. “Yeah… I feel that way about the Tekkers.”

She nods. “You should, they’re a really good example of that. We’ve never been able to have any kind of neutral contact you know that? They just want to come in and to convert everything into more parts, more organic parts.”

She sounds bitter.

I lost friends and shipmates to them so I’m a bit bitter too.

We just sort of stay there for a few minutes before she heads off to speak to my duty chief about one of those endless things that a corporal must do. I see her and the other corporals all the time going back and forth and doing and commanding all sorts of things.

And then she’s off again.

Stillwater always gets me thinking, about how I feel about things and about how she thinks about things or that she’s been in how long? What it’s like being a corporal, or working on a ship like this with recruits like me?

How much I’ve changed in just so little time, and just being here and the training that is really just getting sort of set up with the basics of living in the military and in closed quarters.

I mean when I look back at my old self and just getting ready for signing up had me radically change my life, get tossed out from my family and then sold pretty much everything and bought myself a small little bohemian house in the non-cybered commune or immigrant quarters.

Heck after seeing people here and how really different things really are out here the fact that I have neighbors back home that aren’t the very white mono chrome, cyber living social clones is actually a relief.

It’s something I mull over for the rest of my duty shift and I’m in charge right up until the rest of it with the shift commander only coming out around ten minutes after mine was over but I went ahead and got the next shift underway and up to speed before he comes out since I’m the one left in charge getting out at the end of the shift isn’t an option.

And going to his office and bothering him while he’s there because my shift is ending isn’t an option either.

Just not done unless we’re under attack or the sense-nav suite is on fire.

It’s a pain sure sort of as some of my year mates are gone and there some others that I don’t usually have rotation with here now but it’s not like a big pain since I am one of those people that is an older conversion there’s just this sort of something there even if I led a really shelter life before this…there’s a difference?

Age of spirit maybe?

That and there’s a lot of conversions here. And that’s common outside of home it’s something a lot of like Core worlds in The C.U. have right into their healthcare.

Fixing the body to match the mind, not like the conversion therapy that my sister went through to change the mind to match the body.

But I’m not like a lot of the people that get converted.

I’m not as flash with it.

I went for pretty much what I figured I’d be if I was just me, born as my real self.

Some of them though and I can’t really blame them for going this route they’re very good looking, beautiful with long legs and the bottoms and the waists and such on and so forth.

One of the things I researched is the fact that those super model bodies require maintenance. You have to put in the diets and the workouts and a lot of other things or else you will end up like any other aging baseline.

I figure that me as me and not being too far from being me and myself would be a lot easier to just keep as myself.

It’s not like I could afford things like the very rich people have with gene-mods like increased metabolism and boosted collagen production and all of those things that just seem like way too much in the first place.

Actually I feel like an older baseline in a room full of kids.

Though some of these looks that I get and some of the eager to please attitudes are sort of unnerving.

I’m not used to the notice or feeling like I’m popular.

Or maybe known?

Even being known is really strange, being that woman the one that did this and that and the other thing that people had noticed. Even if it’s just that noticed, I’m used to a life or anonymity, pretty near no one was special or stand out home.

Back home even unintentional was seen as being vain.

I get dismissed from my shift thankfully and I head back to the bunks and I take a nap first thing. It’s that good nap when you hit your rack and it’s just so perfect that you actually smile, make a little sound and wiggle into the mattress.

Oh the feeling of a few hours of a really good nap is amazing.

I wake up when my OBC relays time for evening mess and I get up and I head to get some food and meet up with some of the others who are talking about the different duties that they’ve been doing and of course the whole thing that I was planning.

It’s enough that I schedule my shore leave for the morning giving the system enough time for my post to be filled by another cadet and its flickering approved in my mind’s eye as I go for dessert.

Red-bean pie… it’s more of a pudding pie like dessert and it’s a take-off of sweet red-bean from the human Asian ethnics with a very light crust made from crispy soy-egg foam like something called a pavlova? And it’s accented with ginger flavored sugar.

Very odd, but very good at the same time and something completely different from the foods from home which is a whole lot of the point.

It’s almost cliché for a bunch of women that we eat good and healthy and yet we all seem to go for all these varying desserts and tea.

I like tea for this sort of thing. It just sort of seems right to me.

After evening mess I take some time to go to the gym and do some time on the weights and then some time on the bikes. I like the bikes because they have Sim settings and before I signed up I bought a bicycle and used it to start to get into shape enough to qualify for admittance.

It was a lot of hard work actually after living a sedentary armchair life.

I stop after a good long ride through some very nice scenery with a selected theme from Asian heritage and I was biking through small roads along the side of these hills with tiers of gardens that were full of things and there was a nice sim-breeze to go with it.

It was really nice but even better was that I climbed a few hills and I cycled for an hour.

Done for the night I log out of the gym well satisfied that I gave dessert a good metabolic ass kicking and I head to my quarters area and shower then settle in for an early night going over my OBC classwork.

Yes there’s class work and it’s a lot of reading with a lot of theory and when it’s not theory it’s computational courses like computational navigation and physics.

That’s literally with all of the astrophysics and the knowledge of gravity fields, magnetic fields and all of those variable that come up how to factor them into scan and into navigation. And we’re at the point where we know so much about all of these things that we have ratings for each sort of thing and we have equations that we use for each of those things and then there’s the application of them with considerations for multiple things of these different things in any given situation.

I can actually dream of numbers and astrophysics and how all of these variables apply to moving through the universe…like flying as if I was the ship or a sim sometimes.

And I can just imagine the classes once we get to the actual academy.

Actually it’s much more like a Colonial Union Military University.

Literally a huge city combined with a star base and other bases.

I mean when you think about all of the MOS jobs and the specific jobs and all of the things that you have to learn while taking those jobs like The MC or Mechanized Calvary is more than just tanks and fast tracks it’s hover vehicles and all of those it’s jeeps and ARV’s and it’s a thousand other things that I would have to just guess at.

And then there’s things like all the planetary sensor stuff with me on a crew with these huge deep space signal dishes and a whole network to learn how to read and function.

And yes that’s a thing because Sense-nav is supposed to be able to reboot one of those stations if we land in a no-man’s zone or a place under attack.

I’m looking forward to all of that, to totally going into things that before I joined up I had no clue even were things that people did.

I finish my lessons and skip ahead with two of the ones that are the most tedious for me and that’s calibrations and drive signatures and because they’re tedious I push myself a little harder because the things I like I tend to learn really fast and see through and I even ask the system for a quiz in each before setting my alarm in my OBC to wake me in plenty of time to catch my shuttle down to the surface.

New Ithaca… I wonder what it’s really like down there instead of the vids and the sim stuff. It’ll be my first of The Zodes that I’ll have set foot on and there’ll be deviants or deviations there right in the populace.

I’m not nervous but it’s still very, very different.

It also makes me wonder about my first contact friend, where are they and what are they doing?